Poetry of knowledge and being: the parallel paths of Alberto Girri and Rafael Cadenas

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Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to trace the philosophical inquiries of poets
Alberto Girri (Argentina, 1919–1991) and Rafael Cadenas (Venezuela, 1930). For both
authors, poetry offers a space for examining the relationship of modern subjectivity with
the world by tracing new paths of understanding and consciousness. Neither poet
proposes a closed philosophical system nor adheres to any set of pre-formulated
postulates. Instead, they traverse various modalities of thought toward what Martin
Heidegger has called the “limits of Western metaphysics,” and turn to an eclectic Oriental
tradition as a response.
In the first chapter, I propose a tripartite theoretical framework of investigation,
considering three conceptions of “Man” in relation to the world and language. I begin by
reviewing Michel Foucault’s description of the modern episteme as a diagnositic and
descriptive tool for comprehending the basis of modern subjectiviy. I continue with an
exploration of Martin Heidegger’s analysis of how the question of “what is Being (Sein)”
has been unattended, and “Man” (Dasein) has been overvalued as the knowing subject. I
then review intersections in Heidegger’s work with Taoist and Zen principles. Following
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Heidegger, Girri and Cadenas turn to a poetics of present-presence, exploring alternative
means of conceiving the subject and discovering possible answers in Oriental texts.
In the second chapter, I examine Alberto Girri’s first poetic production as a
denunciation of Man’s existential solitude, radical ignorance, and his failure to achieve
through love, innocence, memory and art a means to overcome his contingency and state
of orphanhood. The second half of his works is then studied as the reduction of the
knowing subject, focusing increasing attention on the ethics of approaching the world
through poetry. Rooted in the here and now, in the negation of the “I,” Girri draws on
principles adopted from J. Krishnamurti and Taoist and Zen authors which elude the
crisis of the subject —at the crux of Western metaphysics— and redefine the human
being in relationship to reality.
Rafael Cadenas’s literary trajectory is examined in a parallel fashion in the third
chapter. His early poetry seeks to recover a lost idyllic state of being and belonging to a
“you” or “other,” which can be identified as a utopian state or origin. Declaring his
failure, the subject undergoes a painful examination in which Man’s vital positions in
regards to his own being and the world are deemed “false maneuvers.” A corrective
poetry is adopted to free the self of a subjectivity that adjudicates “that which is,” thereby
creating a therapeutic space for the abandonment of erroneous notions of self, the
quieting of thought, and the opening of a receptive emptiness to “the other.”
Understanding language as “that which speaks” and as the “house of Being,” Cadenas’s
most recent works, as similarly evidenced in Girri’s latter books, suggest new routes for
recovering an ethical lucidity of consciousness.